Actor-director Andy
Garcia’s film "The Lost City," issued last week on DVD, is independent in more
ways than one. Not only was it made outside Hollywood’s studios; it veers from
the simplistic view that life in Cuba was made infinitely better by the
1958-1959 overthrow of the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista, and it avoids
the typically statist Hollywood hagiography of such bloodthirsty tyrants as
Fidel Castro.

Made for less than $10
million, yet looking as if it cost far more to produce, "The Lost City" is a
film of great moments and of uneven quality. At its heart is a mundane love
story, in which the love interest, portrayed by Inés Sastra, represents Cuba.
Nevertheless, the film is well-acted; the cinematography, striking; and the
soundtrack, which features Beny Moré, Bola de Nieve, Rolando Laserie and nearly
20 other Cuban musical acts, splendid.

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But most notably, the film
serves as a telling counterpoint to the Hollywood zeitgeist that emerged from
the controversies over communism in the 1950s. Hollywood’s skewed perspective
now leads it to minimize the human cost of leftist dictatorships — ironic, given
the sudden prospect of a freer Cuba without Castro.

Garcia and his screenwriter, the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
know the reality of communism better than Hollywood’s armchair political
theorists. Both Garcia and Infante were born in Cuba
— Garcia in 1956, and Infante in 1929. According to Garcia, he left Cuba "at age
five, when my parents decided that I would not have a communist state education,
(and) my life as a Cuban ended and my life as a Cuban American began."

Infante had a more chaotic experience. His father worked as a
journalist for the Communist Party after being imprisoned and blacklisted by
Batista’s government. Guillermo himself was expelled from journalism school for
two years and imprisoned by the Batista regime for using American obscenities in
one of his published short stories.

After Castro took control of Cuba, Infante fell out of
political favor and was sent to Brussels as a cultural attaché. When he returned
to Cuba for his mother’s funeral in 1965, he was inspired to write the pieces
eventually published as the book "View of Dawn in the Tropics." These essays
documented his disillusion with the changes wrought by Castro and resulted in
his temporary detainment in Havana. Following his release, he returned to Europe
and remained exiled from Cuba until his death in February 2005.

The Cuba depicted by Garcia
and Infante in "The Lost City" is a country of political unrest and cultural
high-water marks. Garcia portrays Fico Fellove, a nightclub proprietor who
provides an outlet for Cuba’s rich cultural heritage. Once Castro assumes power,
however, Fico is told to adapt the music and dance numbers to Communist Party
standards, rendering them absurd. Disheartened, Fico exiles himself to the
United States. His more politically active brothers, however, witness the
brutality of not just Batista, but Castro and leftist icon Che Guevara. This
violence is presented through re-enactments of firsthand accounts, as well as
actual newsreel footage of firing squads and beatings.

Portraying ruthless men
like Castro and Guevara from the perspective of the people they killed might one
day lead to better cinema from Hollywood — but don’t hold your breath. In an
ironic twist, Steven Soderbergh, Garcia’s director in "Ocean’s Eleven" and
"Ocean’s Twelve," is planning to film "Guerrilla," a biopic of Guevara starring
Benicio Del Toro. The film undoubtedly will receive a wide release — a poignant
contrast to "The Lost City," whose release was limited to art houses.

Soderbergh intends to
depict Guevara as a complex man rather than the murderous thug he was in
reality. "(Guevara is) a very complicated subject," Soderbergh said in a recent
in a January 2006 interview, "because he's one of the few figures that holds up
the more you scrutinize him, but he was really complicated, and it's been hard
to figure out what story we want to tell because there's a lot of story there."

There may be "a lot of story there" — but the tale of a would-be tyrant is
complicated only if you really want it to be.

#####

Bruce Edward Walker is
science editor at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and
educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in
whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are
properly cited.